Art Which Can’t Be Art (1986)

Alan Kaprow

It’s fairly well known that for the last thirty years my main work as an artist has been located in
activities and contexts that don’t suggest art in any way. Brushing my teeth, for example, in the
morning when I’m barely awake; watching in the mirror the rhythm of my elbow moving up and
down . . .

The practice of such an art, which isn’t perceived as art, is not so much a contradiction as a paradox.
Why this is so requires some background.

When I speak of activities and contexts that don’t suggest art, I don’t mean that an event like brushing
my teeth each morning is chosen and then set into a conventional art context, as Duchamp and many
others since him have done. That strategy, by which an art-identifying frame (such as a gallery or
theater) confers “art value” or “art discourse” on some nonart object, idea, or event, was, in Duchamp’s
initial move, sharply ironic. It forced into confrontation a whole bundle of sacred assumptions about
creativity, professional skill, individuality, spirituality, modernism, and the presumed value and
function of high art itself. But later it became trivialized, as more and more nonart was put on exhibit
by other artists. Regardless of the merits of each case, the same truism was headlined every time we
saw a stack of industrial products in a gallery, every time daily life was enacted on a stage: that
anything can be estheticized, given the right art packages to put it into. But why should we want to
estheticize “anything”? All the irony was lost in those presentations, the provocative questions
forgotten. To go on making this kind of move in art seemed to me unproductive.

Instead, I decided to pay attention to brushing my teeth, to watch my elbow moving. I would be alone
in my bathroom, without art spectators. There would be no gallery, no critic to judge, no publicity. This
was the crucial shift that removed the performance of everyday life from all but the memory of art. I
could, of course, have said to myself, “Now I’m making art!!” But in actual practice, I didn’t think
much about it.

My awareness and thoughts were of another kind. I began to pay attention to how much this act of
brushing my teeth had become routinized, nonconscious behavior, compared with my first efforts to do
it as a child. I began to suspect that 99 percent of my daily life was just as routinized and unnoticed;
that my mind was always somewhere else; and that the thousand signals my body was sending me each
minute were ig- nored. I guessed also that most people were like me in this respect.

Brushing my teeth attentively for two weeks, I gradually became aware of the tension in my elbow and
fingers (was it there before?), the pressure of the brush on my gums, their slight bleeding (should I visit
the dentist?). I looked up once and saw, really saw, my face in the mirror. I rarely looked at myself
when I got up, perhaps because I wanted to avoid the puffy face I’d see, at least until it could be
washed and smoothed to match the public image I prefer. (And how many times had I seen others do
the same and believed i was different!)

This was an eye-opener to my privacy and to my humanity. An unremarkable picture of myself was
beginning to surface, and image I’d created but never examined. It colored the images I made of the
world and influenced how I dealt with my images of others. I saw this little by little.

But if this wider domain of resonance, spreading from the mere process of brushing my teeth, seems
too far from its starting point, I should say immediately that it never left the bathroom. The physicality
of brushing, the aromatic taste of toothpaste, rinsing my mouth and the brush, the many small nuances
such as right-handedness causing me to enter my mouth with the loaded rush from that side and then
move to the left side — these particularities always stayed in the present. The larger implications
popped up from time to time during the subsequent days. All this from toothbrushing.

How is this relevant to art? Why is this not just sociology? It is relevant because devel- opments within
modernism itself let to art’s dissolution into its life sources. Art in the West has a long history of
secularizing tendencies, going back at least as far as the Hellenistic period. by the late 1950s and 1960s
this lifelike impulse dominated the vanguard. Art shifted away from the specialized object in the gallery
to the real urban environment; to the real body and mind; to communications technology; and to remote
natu- ral regions of the ocean, sky, and desert. Thus the relationship of the act of toothbrushing to
recent art is clear and cannot be bypassed. This is where the paradox lies; an artist concerned with
lifelike art is an artist who does and does not make art.

Anything less than paradox would be simplistic. Unless the identity (and thus the meaning) of what the
artist does oscillates between ordinary, recognizable activity and the “resonance” of that activity in the
larger human context, the activity itself reduces to conventional behavior. Or if it is framed as art by a
gallery, it reduces to conventional art. Thus toothbrushing, as we normally do it, offers no roads back to
the real wold either. But ordinary life performed as art/not art can charge the everyday with metaphoric
power.
JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART

interview with allan kaprow

Robert C. Morgan: Let’s talk about your work over the last five or ten years. Let me preface that by
saying that there are two kinds of areas that I’ve followed in your work going back thirty years or so:
the more public art events, which you designated as “happenings,” and then the more intimate art
events, to which Michael Kirby attributed the term “activities.” And in the last decade or so some of the
work you’ve done seems to have been more publicly oriented and some of it has been more privately
oriented.

Allan Kaprow: It’s fairly simply. Some of the work is publicly oriented because it derived from earlier
publicly oriented work in the form of remakes. That is, environmental pieces or some early happenings
that indeed involved, in some transitional way, a public that was asked to be participatory and that after
1962 or 1963 was no longer a public at all but just invited participatory groups. Some of those, in fact,
were very few in number compared to the larger public invited to the earlier stuff. So what you’re
talking about is the historicists’ view of contemporary art, which is to organize lots of shows around the
world based upon earlier models, which they are attempting to bring together and review in the spirit of
historical research. Those are the kinds of works in a remade, highly charged present form that you
have been talking about. But the private work, which is the primary concern, continues.
Morgan: How do you mean, it continues? From where does it begin? What is the origin of the more
private work?
Kaprow: I would say around late 1961 to 1962, right around there, somewhat unevenly and sort of
spottily, I began to do pieces that were based upon a short text of actions that only involved a handful
of friends or students at some specific site — a site that was not marked as an art site, a ravine
somewhere, or a roadway, or somebody’s apartment, or the telephone, that is, the places of everyday
life, not designated as sites of art. And the work itself, the action, the kind of participation, was as
remote from anything artistic as the site was.
Morgan: When did you began to make this distinction between lifelike art and artlike art?
Kaprow: From about then. I didn’t use those words then. I chose the word Happening from its normal
language usage somewhat earlier for that philosophical reason, but I didn’t categorize that as lifelike
until much later. But in fact, looking back, that’s exactly what Happening meant.
Morgan: You’ve been very critical of work that only stays within an aesthetic purview. What is your
reasoning for this?
Kaprow: Well, it’s a love-hate criticism, of course.
I shouldn’t say of course because not everybody would know that I really am quite concerned about
the art that I seem to repudiate. But it is more about the present situation than it is about past art. And to
try to answer as specifically as I can, the problem with artlike art, or even doses of artlike art that still
linger in lifelike art, is that it overemphasizes the discourse within art, that is, art’s own present
discourse as well as its historical one. Peripherentiality is loaded so much in art that the application to,
the analogy to, the involvement in everyday life is very difficult. So what I am primarily interested in is
the kind of activity, like the brushing of my teeth — whether associated with happenings or not —
whose reference to other art events is very, very remote, if indeed possible to make at all. In a talk that I
gave a couple of nights ago at the School of Visual Arts, I described what a friend and I did in Germany
one time to do something nice for each other. And that nice event was to clean each other’s kitchen
floors. And so we arranged to trade keys, only it was decided that the way to do this event was going to
be a little unusual. Instead of the usual mops and cleanser, we were going to use Q-tips and spit.
Without going into it too deeply, what happened there was an apparently obsessive act, but one that was
decided upon, not compelled. Both of us had the freedom to stop.
Morgan: It was an agreement, a contract, so to speak.
Kaprow: Let’s do something very, very unusual, while seeming to accomplish something rather kindly
toward each other that was needed to be done anyway.
Morgan: There are certain recurring themes in your work. I remember a 1973 piece that involved
fluids.
Kaprow: Precious bodily fluids are a humorous reference to Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001, where, as the
world is about to break apart, the general of the high command of the armed forces is bemoaning the
possible loss of his precious bodily fluids in a great soliloquy of fear. And so this thought remained that
was very, very funny, that bleeding, spitting, urinating, and so on are all leakages of sorts, and you can
attribute meaning to that as you wish, be it negative, positive, or humorous as in my case. I thought it
could be very interesting to use as a cleaning fluid that which is normally thought of as unclean.
Morgan: A lot of your work has dealt with assumed prohibitions in relation to society. This whole idea
of fluids seems to be about prohibition and perhaps relates to Andres Serrano’s photographs in the kind
of ranker that has been stirred in relation to the Piss Christ image, for example.
Kaprow: I had never thought of the Andres Serrano thing as a connection, but indeed it is, just as there
is a connection to Kubrick’s film, and there’s also a connection to much psychoanalytic literature,
which I may or may not have read. The use of an image of something that is deemed private and
sometimes, because it’s part of human waste, even offensive in Serrano’s work is definitely the same as
much of the sort of things over the years that I’ve done myself. But one big difference is that I don’t
take that activity, that reference, and make it public as he did. Nor do I join it with sacrosanct imagery
or belief systems in such a way as to set up a conflict the way he does. My guess is that he could have
put as much piss in a show as he wanted had it not been associated with Jesus Christ and he wouldn’t
have aroused the concern that it has. So his must have been a very conscious disruptive decision
calculating on its shock value, and that hasn’t been my concern. While our interest may seem
superficially the same, I think that his concern is probably used up right there, that he will probably not
be concerned with bodily fluids very much, if at all, after this.
Morgan: Shifting back to this thing about lifelike art, I remember an interview you did several years
ago with Kate Horsefield for the Video Data Bank in which she asked you what you were thinking
about in your work. Your very interesting response was that you were thinking about “subjective
things.” I know that you’ve written articles in Artforum recently that describe various kinds of intimate
behavior that for the most part are totally without any kind of object orientation. It’s an event, but even
the event is elusive. It's difficult to define the event. It has that kind of sensibility or linguistic twist
maybe that Duchamp's ready-made would have where once you take the bottle-drying rack out of its
normal usage, it ceases to have that definition because objects in our culture are defined according to
their use value. And once we take the use value away, then the object is suspended in a kind of alien
relationship to culture. A lot of the subjective things you are dealing with are very much about
suspending normal human operations in such a way that they appear or seem very alien.
Kaprow: Well, I think the analogy is a good one.I must have learned that sort of function of
displacement from Duchamp. You reveal something and its oddness by removing it from its normal
usage. But about the harder described activity of something going on in these events that I engage in or
lay out . . . I don’t think they’re so hard to describe, it’s just that they seem odd because of the way
they’re framed.
Morgan: Well, perhaps that’s what I was getting at, the whole contextual problem. But even the piece
you described with the Q-tips cleaning the kitchen, you can communicate that to an audience or
whoever, and people get the idea, but it seems that there is a whole experiential frame that the piece is
really about.
Kaprow: Of course. I use those very simple kinds of points of departure simply to get going into
something else. Here’s an example: a colleague of mine from the music department and I decided that
we had too much administrative work at the university and we would do pieces for each other. For a
period of weeks we did just that, for a couple of hours each time. And they were simply exchanges of
certain kinds with each other. One week I offered the following: that we would go out to a ravine at the
outer edges of the campus, chaparral all over The sun was out at that time, and the objective of our
interaction was taking off on the idea of “follow a leader.” We would decide by chance which one of us
would follow the other one in walking through a chaparral up and down the ravine for as much time as
we had. And the way we would do it was, instead of literally following one another, the one who was
following would follow the shadow of the one in front, endeavoring to step on that shadow no matter
how fast and in what direction the person was walking. That meant sometimes, because the sun was
high in the sky, that you would virtually step on the heels of the person in front of you. But what was
interesting about it was that depending upon in which direction you went up and down and through the
chaparral, your shadow would swing around, so 360 degrees of activity took place And if you were
going up the ravine and the sun was on the other side of you, it would be a much shorter shadow than if
you would go down the ravine on the other side when the shadow would lengthen because of the angle
on the ground. So the shadow was swinging around, shortening and lengthening, and an effort to
constantly step on that as mode of following the leader resulted in some very, very humorous near-
accidents that in many cases meant breaking the contact. All this time we were free to exchange
conversation about anything we wanted, so we were talking about the department while trying to do
that. There was a displacement of focus going on right there; at the same time, an absurdity, which
provokes the question to me right at the moment, as much as to anyone else to whom I describe this,
why was I doing this sort of thing?
Morgan: The relationship between language, that is, the conversation that you were having with this
man about the administrative affairs in the department, and the activity sets up a kind of dissemblance.
I remember, in a conversation with you a number of years ago, we got into a discussion on the theater
of the absurd. You mentioned Eugene Ionesco as somebody who you really admired . . .
Kaprow: The early work.
Morgan: . . . where, in fact, there was this kind of dissemblance of language. And many of these events
would deliberately set up parameters, where there is bound to be some kind of breaking apart of
expectations in terms of how we predict behavior, or how we predict the course of events. This issue of
chance is very strong in your work, even though there are still fixed parameters that you’re dealing
with.
Kaprow: Well, the absurd is a way of stopping to rethink what’s going on. If something seems absurd,
the first question that comes up is, why is this occurring? Why have I been responsible, if I have been,
for this absurdity? What am I learning from it? Now, unless I’m a professor while I’m doing this sort of
thing, which I am not, I generally don’t know the answers so that it becomes an experiential rather than
intellectual matter.
Morgan: The one thing that you seem to have successfully overcome in your brand of performance art
— I don’t mean to sound disparaging at all — is a kind of overdetermination, which I think is highly
problematic in much performance art. In other words, it seems as though the way you set these events
up you don’t end up doing what you deny, but you really take the performance to another level. You
seem to avoid the academic rut of overdetermination, of overstructuring, or as Miles Davis once told
me in a conversation, overarranging.
Kaprow: Well, you know, a lot of work nowadays tends to be illustrative of theory already written, and
some of it tends to be quite consciously didactic, as if the determination is to teach somebody
something. And letting that go for the moment, as far as its value is concerned, it’s exactly the opposite
of what I seem to find most useful, and that is to leave things open and not determine anything except
the very clear form. The form is always very simple and clear. What is experienced is uncertain and
unforeseeable, which is why I do it, and its point is never clear to me, even after I’ve done it. So that’s a
very, very different way of looking at the nature of our responsibility in the world.
Morgan: I think that’s a very significant issue in your work, and something that really needs to be dealt
with more often in terms of critical responses to work. There doesn’t have to be a point. There is no
proof on the basis of some hypothesis. It is really the experiential dimension that reveals the form of
construction. Now, that wasn’t a slip of the tongue, I meant to say, form of construction because —
being familiar with your work — there is a certain lexicon or vocabulary . . .
Kaprow: You’re talking about a repertory of certain themes that recur and uses of those themes that
recur and yet that doesn’t really result in a closure. It’s the use of those kinds of things that keeps them
open, or at least I try to keep them open.
Morgan: Well, I think, being trained as an artist and art historian, you’re very sensitive, unquestionably,
to that kind of manipulation or strategy.
Kaprow: If you just discount the military meaning of strategy, it is a clear and conscious planning
device to provide as much open uncertainty in an experience as possible, though I’m quite aware that I
don’t set up situations for me or anybody else where they’ll be endangered. I know enough to avoid
those kinds of things without compromising the openness that, in general, I like to enhance. So you’re
absolutely right in seeing the lexica, so to speak, as gradually spelling itself out as a kind of kit bag of
themes that recur in one way or another, certain devices that are used for bringing those in some
curious displaced focus. And I was going to say at one point, when you were talking about this being in
a tradition that was helped by Duchamp’s displacing a found object, such as a bottle rack, from its usual
context to an art context, that I don’t need that kind of device because that’s no longer particularly
revealing, unless we jump out of the art world itself and displace certain kinds of routine and generally
unnoticed human events from that condition to being unnoticed into something where I focus on them,
but not, you might say, in the way that psychoanalysis or social analysis does, that is, I’m not earnest
about it. I try to screw it up as much as possible. I don’t point to it in the light of reason but of
unreason.
Morgan: This gets back to chance related to the absurd and, ultimately, to Duchamp. One thing that I
credit you with is expanding contemporary aesthetics away from the purely aesthetic domain. I think
this has been true right from your article “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (Artnews, 1958) down to
the present. More than any other American artist, with the possible exception of Hans Haake, you have
been expanding the aesthetic frame through the integration of the social sciences, primarily, and, to
some extent, even the physical sciences. Now we have to deal with aesthetics more interactively, not
simply as a pure phenomenon but as a kind of poststructural phenomenon, and you were doing this
very consciously, as far as I know, twenty years ago.
Kaprow: Well, it wasn’t because I was interested in structuralism or, for that matter, poststructuralism,
which didn’t exist then . . .
Morgan: No, poststructuralism didn’t exist then, but in many ways the way you combined these
interests with art now, retrospectively, at least from a critical point of view, seems as though you
predated many of the concerns of poststructuralism as it has become artistic jargon.
Kaprow: Well, partly that would seem perfectly reasonable given the aversion I have to the arts as
models. Now I have to qualify that all the time. This is not because I don’t like the arts, or that I’m not
interested in the arts of other people. But as far as I was personally concerned, the un-arting process
was primary and, therefore, I would not find useful any integration of social and cultural theory into
art-making. That, for me, would be absolutely useless, and that’s what’s happened, although the use
that some people have made of the social sciences, information theory for example, is interesting in
their work. But I would always want it to be farther away from the art world than it customarily is
found — I’m thinking of Barbara Kruger and other people whose work is interesting as long as it stays
out in the anonymous world of billboards, or the early Jenny Holzer with her little tracts that were stuck
up on telephone poles or peeling walls, without any name attached to it. But once that stuff is moved
increasingly into the elegant world of the arts, where you might say you’re always teaching the
converted, then it seems to have short-circuited its possible concatenated capacity.
Morgan: I understand what you are saying, and it seems as though you’re searching for dialectic
relationship to the social. I don’t know if this would be correct from your point of view, but by avoiding
successfully this overdetermination in your work, you also avoid overaestheticizing. In doing so, would
you say there is a trepidation that you have about your events becoming too fetishized?
Kaprow: No, I don’t worry about that because it doesn’t last. Fetishes tend to be functional as long as
you hold them in your hand.
Morgan: But you can hold also an obsession.
Kaprow: My obsessions, to the extent that I have them, are quite unconscious. To the extent that I use
obsessiveness, as in that floor-cleaning piece with the Q-tips, it’s italicized and intentional and usually a
humoristic situation.
Morgan: So again, getting back to the element of the absurd in relation to strategy, the idea that
somehow the system is going to abort itself through the process of enactment.
Kaprow: That’s an interesting word, abort, it has gravity . . . You could somehow use a more humorous
word, which could be something like it would collapse, or break down like a badly constructed or
repaired motor, or like that wonderful event of Tinguely’s, where he made a huge contraption in the
backyard of the Museum of Modern Art called Homage to New York, which was a machine that
destroyed itself in various humorous ways. It’s that breakdown system along with slippages that you
can’t predict I find most interesting, not because I want to make a point about society as being a broken
down system or that all life is entropic — I don’t, but rather that its process is unforeseeable. The
insights that one might get from that may be far and in between, and you’re left with huge gaps of
uncertainty if you want to pay attention to that — we don’t like to play attention to that. I’m no
different than anybody else in that regard, but what I do in part is to set up a game plan that forces me
to pay attention to those things that I would ordinarily suppress or repress, such as the inability to plan
my life . . .
Morgan: . . . that again gets back to the reference of life in relation to art, as opposed to art in relation to
life.
Kaprow: Yeah. So what could we say about that? It is a matter of paradox; therefore, when I say I’m
interesting in “un-arting,” that is to divest as much as possible in my own work what I know about art.
It’s a paradox because I can’t do it any more than, for example, I could follow John Cage’s seeming
belief that I could focus on the autonomy of the sound itself, divorced from context or memory.
Morgan: Well, it’s a pragmatic phenomenology, the way I see it. It’s a very practical, almost
instrumental use of language and action that you’re dealing with; at the same time, you’re not imposing
models from social science to the extent that it is going to dismiss any possibility, any rupture within
the enactment of the piece. In other words, there is always room for slippage in your work.
Kaprow: There’s not only room, but I insist on it.
Morgan: When you talk about the absurd, or when I sense the absurd in your works, I don’t see your
meaning of the absurd as an existential dilemma, but as another kind of absurd that is more within the
process of daily life, the pragmatics of how we actually see reality or ourselves.
Kaprow: Let me give you an example. You’re waiting at a bus stop along with a few other people. You
wait for a half hour. The bus comes along and you get on. The fare is a dollar fifty, and you reach into
your pocket and you find a dollar and forty-five cents. You say to the driver, “I only have a dollar forty-
five. Will you cash a twenty dollar bill?” He says, “We don’t cash twenty dollar bills,” and points to the
sign on the coin box. And you have to get off. Now this is a typical example of what happens every day
in our lives. And we often complain about these things: Why is the world this way? But what’s evident
to me is that ninety-nine percent of the world is that way and there is no possible way to change that.
Maybe there’s no need to change it, even though the more earnest of us and the world’s leaders keep
talking about control and making things come out the way they want them or they think they ought to
be. So it’s an attitude toward the world that is perhaps more permissive, a little bit more humorous,
more gently ironical, more accepting, even though there is the apparent magnitude of suffering. Some
will find this position of mine privileged, indifferent, but, in my point of view, this is the only route
toward compassion, whereas insisting on fixing the world, as we see so far, is not successful. We
haven’t prevented street people from being street people, or stopping the war in the gulf by the
moralisms that abound today. So it’s a different way of looking at the kind of life we have.

Text: © Copyright, Journal of Contemporary Art, Inc. and the authors.

...............................................................................

An Interview with Allan Kaprow

John Held Jr.

The following interview was videotaped at the Dallas Public Library Cable Access Studio in 1988
while Mr. Kaprow was attending, "Proceedings," a sympiosium in his honor held at the University of
Texas at Arligngton. It was subsequently broadcast on Dallas Cable Access TV.
John Held, Jr: Tonight we have a very special guest, Mr. Allan Kaprow, who is in Dallas this week of
April 12 through 16 (1988) to have a retrospective of his actions of the past called "Proceedings" at the
University of Texas at Arlington. Mr. Kaprow, it's a pleasure to have you with us this evening to talk
about your work.
Allan Kaprow: Thank you.
JH: Of course, you are best known as the person who coined the phrase "happenings." I just wonder
how you felt the first time you heard the Supremes singing that song, "The Happening." Did you...
AK: I'd already repudiated the word, because many other people before that were using it. It was a
catch word. You remember everybody went around going, "What's happening, baby?" Political
uprisings on campuses and advertisements for butter and brassieres were all using the word
"happening." I remember one ad showed a floating woman in outer space, a starry background, and the
legend was, "I dreamt I was in a happening in my Maidenform brassiere." So by that time movies and
the Supremes and all were in general usage around the world in ways that had nothing to do with my
original sense, which became so foreign to me that I just dropped it. However, it's like your name, you
can't drop it without somebody coming and picking it up and saying, "You dropped something mister."
JH: The place you used it first was a paper about Jackson Pollack?
AK: Yes. It was actually semi-conscious. It occurred in a paragraph toward the end of the article, which
was about the presumed legacy of that artist, who had died shortly before then, in which I said there are
two directions in which the legacy could go. One is to continue into and develop an action kind of
painting , which was what he was doing, and the other was to take advantage of the action itself,
implicit as a kind of dance ritual. Instead of making ritualistic actions, which might be one directions
someone could take, I was proposing the hop right into real life, that one could step right out of the
canvas, which in his case, he did while painting them.
JH: It seems to be a continuation of the Abstract Expressionist concept that the process was just as
important as the product. Tell me if I'm wrong, but you were bringing the painting to life?
AK: Well, painting as painting is a lively affair in any case. Let's not repudiate painting. My interest
was not in negating painting, it was to add to the number of options that an artist had at that time. I had
been a painter. I might even say that I was beginning to be somewhat successful among my colleagues
at that point. That was 1956. But, the idea of going farther was a heritage of Modernism at that point.
hat each younger generation went farther then the last one. And the notion of a progressive
amplification of options, even of a revolutionary sort, was part of our upbringing. So I was offering that
option, not as a denouncement, but rather as one more opening into some other future.
JH: You mentioned that you were a painter, and you were a student in the early fifties studying under
some of...
AK: In the forties.
JH: In the forties. And early fifties with Meyer Schapiro?
AK: I studied painting then under the greatest teacher in the world of Modernist painting and that was
Hans Hoffman, who was of course a distinguished member of the Abstract Expressionist group in New
York. And that was the liveliest school you could find anywhere. It was superb. I was very lucky, and
when I studied with Meyer Schapiro, who was an eminent historian, it was a parallel study. It was not
only art in the practical sense, it was art history and the philosophy of art, which I had been studying in
the university before that. That was to do my masters, and I thought at the time my post-graduate work
too. But I got my masters degree and did most of my course work in art history for my PhD and then I
got a job with his help, that is with Meyer Schapiro's help, at Rutger's, teaching art history, and chucked
the whole post-graduate program, which they never let me forget.
JH: You were concentrating then on Mondrian. Why?
AK: He was my thesis. I was interested in what turned out to be a key to what I'm doing now, although
I didn't realize it then. In that master's thesis, which was an intensive analysis of the optical effects of
looking at Mondrian, in a way that I thought had gotten cues from his writings, that if you do that
intensively, that is almost staring for as long as two hours at a painting, the relativity of all the parts
increases to the point that the clarity that you first see in the picture, you know, those straight lines - the
whites, the blacks, the reds, the blues, and the yellows - no longer are at all clear. They start bending.
They start disappearing under your glance, in a way that using the same kind of staring technique at
other works will not happen. So there is something unique about that, and I convinced that when he
was talking about the mutual destruction of all parts of the work, which would produce some sort of
transcendent unity at the end, he was dealing with the elimination of painting through itself. I didn't put
it that way. I ascribed to it a kind of mystical state, which I think was correct in his terms. But later on
the idea took form in a different way with me when, indeed, I separated the action of action painting
from the painting part of it, and in a sense jumped into life.
JH: It was very interesting to me. Those were two great teachers, Hans Hoffman and Meyer Schapiro.
At the same time, a great many things were happening at Black Mountain College in North Carolina,
and it seems that so many of your latter colleagues came out of Black Mountain, or had some
experience with it. Did you yourself ever visit there?
AK: No. I tried to get a job there after I completed my masters work and decided to stop doing the
PhD. I didn't know what to do next, and I thought I was getting this job at Rutgers, but I wasn't sure so
I was trying, as any young man would, as many options as I possibly could. One of them was Black
Mountain, and they said to me, people who were colleagues of mine and friends, for example the
composer Stefen Volker was there, and Bill de Kooning had been there, and I asked them about it.
There was a party one night when they were in New York, some of it's recruiters were in New York,
trying to scare up students, and I asked them for a job, and they said, "Sure, if you want to milk cows.
We can't pay you." So I told them politely, thank you, I'd have to consider other alternatives.

JH: Were you married at this time. Were you supporting a family?
AK: No. Not yet.
JH: You were running a gallery? The Hansa gallery. Did that come into being about this time?
AK: The Hansa was going for years before that. It started in '53 or '54, first at one of the artists studios,
Wolf Kahn, then subsequently it got it's own place toward the end of '53, I think, down in the 4th
Avenue area, near 9th or 10th Streets. But that then grew subsequently into an uptown gallery, which I
was part of for awhile, and then, as a cooperative it dissolved as most of the artists went on to bigger
and better commercial galleries. Then I joined the Judson Group downtown at the Judson Church. At
the same time, I was part of the group that overlapped to become the Reuben Gallery, where the first
happenings were given.
JH: One thing I was extremely interested in while reading over your biography was that you attended a
class given by John Cage at the New School for Social Research. And the reason this intrigued me so
much was that, being familiar with the Fluxus artists - Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Yoko Ono, etc. -
that's how they started - from that class of Cage.
AK: He was a kind of train station. People would sort of gather there and wait for the next train. I
actually was a student of his. That was not the case with all of them. Many of them were occasional
visitors. But I was already teaching at Rutgers by then. That was 1957, and I knew him slightly. Knew
his work, of course. But at that point I was trying to introduce a richer range of sound into the
environmental stuff that I was doing parallel with the early happenings that were done. So I went to the
class - I had been on a mushroom hunt with him, that's what it was, with George Brecht, who was a
neighbor of mine at that time in New Jersey - and I asked John at that time about the problems I was
having with the sounds. There were mechanical gadgets that I had gimmicked up as best I could, you
know, those wonderful toys the Japanese made - gorillas that growl, cows that moo, and things like that
- and these were interesting, but after awhile they got boring, rather mechanical and expected, so I
asked him what to do. And he said, "Why don't you come to the class next week." So I drove in for the
class, and he explained rather quickly that I could use tape decks, a half dozen cheap tape decks, make
all the sounds in advance, and put them on in some sort of random order, or program them as I wanted,
and then distribute loud speakers around the room, and these things would have a much greater
richness, done in a collage fashion, which I could understand readily, having done that, then any of the
mechanical toys I had done. So I thought that was - he explained it in five minutes. You just take sticky
tape and stick all these things together which you've previously recorded and put into envelopes. And
he said, "Why don't you stay for the class?" "Fine," I said. At the end of the class I was so fascinated
with what was going on I asked him if I could attend it regularly, and he said, "Sure." And that's where
I actually did the first proto-happenings with the participation of the rest of the class members.
Everyone was given homework every week and came in with a piece. And that's where I began doing
that sort of work.
JH: Some of the first happenings, aside from those in Cage's class, were done on George Segal's farm.
And I know that the Fluxus people did things there too. They had a Yam Festival...
AK: That was done later. In 1963.
JH: So many things were going on there. What was the karma?
AK: Well, George Segal was a neighbor of mine, and became a fast friend, and has remained so. I was
living on a chicken farm, in a cabin there, while teaching at Rutgers, and he was a painter so we got to
know each other very quickly. And pretty soon there were years in which we had annual picnics for our
artworld friends of ours, who never in those days got out of New York. So it was a big thing to come
out for a weekend to either the farm I was living on, or the farm George was living on. It was there that
in one of these years we decide as part of the entertainments, to try out some of the happenings that I
had been working on in John Cage's class, or at least developing the prototypes for, but now on a
somewhat bigger scale, because physically we could use the chicken coops, the fields, the tractors,
whatever we wanted, and a casual atmosphere of friends was present that allowed people to do it, or not
to do it, as they wished. And of course, that's where I started putting into some practice the things that I
started in John's class.
JH: It occurs to me that alot of this type of activity had precursors in the Dada movement...
AK: Sure. And the Futurists.
JH: ..it was in the air then too, and then it petered out in the twenties, thirties..
AK: That's right.
JH: ...forties, and then all of a sudden in the fifties - here it was again - with yourself, and the Fluxus
people, and Gutai in Japan...
AK: They were before us.
JH: ...and Yves Klein and the Nouveau Realists in France.
AK: Right.
JH: It just happened again. Why? Why after all those years...
AK: There's no explanation for it. The usual kind of exhaustion principle, that the prior avant-garde had
exhausted itself is true, but it's not an adequate explanation, because you don't find it happening with
every exhaustion. So, why it happened pundits will have fun on speculating, and I'm sure they're all
right. It's just beyond us. One could draw parallels today with the powerful conservative backlash that
occurred right after the exhaustion of Abstract Expressionists around the world. Particularly those in
New York in the Eisenhower years. You know, the rampages of Joe McCarthy and the Cold War in
Europe. There were alot of features which resemble those of today. And one could say today perhaps
almost for twenty years now, we've been in a neo-conservative state with back to all kinds of
prototypical modernisms, now quoted, now so called post-modernist snide tickle-tickley cutesy stuff,
all of it feeding a consumerist market, of course. Which has been revived when it was practically killed
during the period that you're talking about. Well, who's to say how long this is going to last. There have
been many many of these periods as there was before and whether this will be followed by a resurgence
of experimentation is hard for anyone to predict. Meanwhile, of course, I'm still on this earth and very
very healthy, thank heaven, and my experiments, like some of my colleagues from those days, still go
on. They happen to be not particularly interesting to the prevailing tenor of the period.
JH: You mentioned Gutai, the Japanese avant-garde movement, and that it happened just previous to
your involvement. Did you know about them?
AK: No. Not until 1958, which was when I had already begun working myself, so it was quite a
refreshing thing to discover that by 1955 or so, for a few years up to that point, they had been very
active. Coming from a very different cultural background though, not uncongenial with the West.
JH: Many of your contemporaries of the time formed a group, Fluxus, but you remained on you own.
Fluxus, I should mentioned, revolved around the leadership of George Maciunas. But you didn't get
sucked into that cyclone.
AK: Well, George and I couldn't get along. Indeed, he approached me as he did everybody else to sign
my entire career away to him, and I thought this was a Fluxus joke. So I said, "Up yours." And he took
it seriously. But he was a marvelous man. I mean the energy and cohesion that he gave to a disparate
number of artists around the world was extraordinary. So I don't say this unpleasant part history with
any kind of rancor. It was like oil and water.
JH: He was a very difficult person to get along with.
AK: Evidently.
JH: You are mportant in several areas. One is performance. It has many levels now, but you're
considered to be a father of the modern movement in performance. Another thing is installation, and
your work with what you called assemblage.
AK: Well, let's backtrack a minute. Performance is the replacement of the word happening, or event, or
activity, which we used in those days to refer to a number of somewhat related kinds of real time
events. What's called an installation today is the child of what used to be called, before the happenings,
an environment. Now, I think that if you look at the words there, the shifts indicate something like a
real change toward the installation compared to that of the environment, and the performance to that of
the happening. If you look at the word installation, installation means, very simply and literally, that
somebody is taking something already fabricated or made, generally, and installing it. It has a kind of
implicit art activity to it. It also suggests a kind of aesthetic intentionally, much as you would install a
sculpture in a museum. The environment, the etymology of the word, and the whole connotation of the
word environment, is that of a surround, in which the particular parts are not necessarily placed with
some kind of formal care for their external cohesion, but rather as an interaction between the person
who is being surrounded and the stuff of that environment. It has a kind of a fullness to it, which the
work installation doesn't. Installation suggests a discreteness. Now, look at the word performance. It too
has a conservative evocation. When you hear that word you think of Jascha Heifitz performing on the
violin, Sir Laurence Olivier performing Shakespeare, and so on. You don't ordinarily think of a high
performance engine, which is the more vernacular meaning of the word in English, and in many other
European languages it's used the same way. So, there is the return to a kind of artifying activity, a kind
of singular focus on the performer as artist, in a way that a virtuoso was a performer in classical music,
or still is. Or an actor.
Now, I think those two words, installation and performance, mark accurately the shift in attitude toward
a rejection or sense of abandonment of an experimental, modernist, position which had prevailed up to
about, lets be generous, up to about 1968-1969, and began gradually becoming less and less energized.
So, I think what you're getting there is the flavor of modernist exhaustion and incidently a return to
earlier prototypes, or models, of what constitutes art. And it's no accident that the majority of most
performance nowadays, there's not much installation anymore, by the way, the majority of those
performances tend to be of an entertainment, show biz, song and dance, in which the focus is on the
individual as skilled presenter of something that tends to have a kind of self-aggrandizing, or at least
self-focusing, purpose. It is artist as performer, much like somebody is an entertainer in a nightclub.
And they're interesting. Some of them are very good. I think Laurie Anderson is very good. She's got
all the skills that are needed in theater, which is what this is. Many others who jump on the bandwagon,
coming from the visual arts, have no theatrical skills, and know zilch about the timing, about the voic
about positioning, about transitions, about juxtapositions, those moment by moment occurrences in
theater that would make it work. But it's another animal, whether good or bad, from what we were
doing, and I think, in general, even the good ones are a conservatizing movement.
JH: You prefer the activity, or the event, rather then an audience/actor dichotomy. You were taking the
action away from galleries and into the environment itself.
AK: Well, I wanted to pursue this thread, so to speak. I was like a hound dog on the scent. I wasn't
particularly concerned about leading the artworld like the Pied Piper. I mean, it would be nice if they
followed, but it wasn't really necessary. So you asked a moment ago about how I wasn't part of a group,
although I occasionally intersected, and the reason is that I was really quite charmed by this scent that I
was on. So, I don't want to put anybody else at a disadvantage here as being less good. But what
interested me was that scent, which was, to put it another way, about the possibility of a totally new art.
An art, which like Mondrian's pictures, would dissolve into a kind of life equivalent.
JH: Unfortunately we are short on time, and I can't pursue as many lines as I'd love to pursue. We are
skipping over an illustrious teaching career at the University of California at San Diego, and also brings
us to why you are here in Dallas this week to participate in a retrospective of your actions. Are you
excited about this point that you've come to, where a whole week is being devoted to your past work?
AK: Well, I haven't had a chance to be excited yet (laughs), the work is so overwhelming. But what I
should say in a capsule, is that the idea that I should have a retrospective was essentially that of Jeff
Kelly, with the approval of the former-chair, Jeff Sperlock of the University of Texas at Arlington. They
proposed it. Jeff getting on the phone quite often. And at first it seemed impossible, because how can
you retrospect on a thirty-year career where everything was a throw-away.
Events were simply dissolved into the air, as all events are. And the best one could have about those
events was a memory, distorted perhaps, but a memory. So, it occurred to us, that the way that we may
go about this was not to have a show in the conventional sense, since there's nothing to show, but to
have a yearlong of retrospections. Which might mean, and it turned out this way, that I would invent
my career. And that's the way it would be interesting to me.
All these events had been, for the most part, once only things, and they were meant as changeable
events, there was no fixed form in them, depending upon where they were, who did them, so why not
continue to change my memory of them. After all, it's a faulty memory, and I might as well take the
whole thing by the horns, so to speak, and do it with great joy. That is, change willfully.
So, in taking one of the first of the selected events to recapitulate, the one we did in New York a few
weeks ago, which you've probably heard is very often quoted as a fairly well-known prototype of that
time, "18 Happenings in 6 Parts." I wholesale changed it. I took it's principals of participation, of
changeability, of simultaneity, and spread these, instead of the original loft work where the thing had
taken place in 1959, I had it take place at the desires of the participants all over New York City.
JH: Did you have some of the same people...
AK: I tried to get them, but for one reason or another, some of them just weren't available.
JH: Because I was just looking at the original program today and it was a pretty impressive cast, such
as John Cage, Ray Johnson, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Filliou, George Brecht...
AK: There were alot of my colleagues there. But for one reason or another we couldn't get them this
time. They were busy
.
JH: Well, I thank you for speaking with us today, and wish you the best of luck in the week ahead.
AK: Thank you.